This site has been up for almost 10 years now (wow!) and in that time I’ve had some unusual and interesting emails. However, this is possibly a first. While I’ve had many many conversations with owners of shopping cart companies, this is the first time I’ve been contacted by the owner of a shopping cart company. So, uhh, on with the review?

The “EG-1001″ shopping cart is made by NewSky Tech. They appear to be based in China. The EG-1001 seems to be a relatively unconventional design, unusually deep and not like the flatter bed shopping carts I have used in the past at my weekly grocery run.

While I didn’t have the opportunity to use the EG-1001 in person, the picture provided does seem a little flimsy. While the rear wheel is a well proportioned 9 inches, it does seem weak and I’d be concerned about putting too many melons and canned goods in the trolley less the wheel should collapse.

Overall, based on the photo, I wouldn’t recommend it except for light shoppers and those with healthy backs.

(I swear I’m not making this up! I really did get the email and all facts above are extracted directly from it.)

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 25th, 2011 | Author: Mark | No Comments

There are some very easy to implement techniques that will help eCommerce merchants to avoid fraud. Following these techniques will save you time, money, aggravation and help you avoid developing a bad online reputation. Having been in the eCommerce space for over 12-years I have seen a wide spectrum of fraud on the Internet. Almost every case of fraud could have been avoided if the merchant had their payment gateway configured correctly. In most cases, the transactions are glaringly fraudulent; but the merchant is so thrilled to have a great order that they overlook the obvious signs and fill the order only to get burned. Here are my suggestions for avoiding online fraud.

Merchant Account Set Up
When you are going through the merchant account application process it is important to give the bankers realistic numbers. You will need to provide the bank with numbers such as estimated annual transaction volume, estimated monthly volume, and minimum and maximum transaction amounts. It has been my experience that merchants like to exaggerate these numbers think it will impress the bank. That is a mistake. Give the bank conservative numbers, especially if you are just starting out online. It will take a year before you are transacting with any volume. These numbers can easily be increased as needed. The bank uses these numbers to setup set up profiles for you in their fraud prevention systems. This is your first line of defense, the more accurate the numbers you provide, the more likely the bank can protect your account. Remember, the bank’s job is to help you with sales, not prevent them. They can only run things so tight or too many of your transactions will fail. The bank’s fraud prevention system is only one layer of defense. It is not your merchant bank’s job to watch every transaction for fraud, they will only pick up some of the transactions that are outside of your profile. That leaves plenty of room for fraud inside those parameters. Your merchant application is not a business plan. Don’t bloat the numbers; you will only be hurting yourself.

AuthCapture (bad) AuthOnly (Good)
There are two types of transactions you can run when receiving payment online: Authorize and Capture (AuthCapture) and Authorize Only (AuthOnly). You can greatly reduce your exposure to fraud if you run AuthOnly. I strongly recommend setting your transactions to AuthOnly. An AuthOnly transaction will require the merchant to review orders and market them for settlement if it passes their scrutiny. I know, cash flow, you need your money now and AuthOnly could mean that it will take another day before you have your money, and its so much work to mark transactions for settlement. Get over it! You can wait one more day for your money and it only takes one click to mark a transaction for settlement.

Merchants often have a false sense that the bank, the gateway or the ecommerce platform will protect them from fraud, and ultimately someone other then the merchant will be responsible for paying for the fraudulent activity. The merchant ultimately pays for fraud and has a duty to screen their transactions for fraud.

The merchant is responsible for scrutinizing their transactions and approving the ones that pass a simple test. Here is what to look for:

1. Did the transaction pass the Address Verification System (AVS) check?
2. Did the CVV code have a match?
3. Are the shipping and billing addresses the same?
4. Common sense check?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, then the merchant must take a closer look at that particular order. If someone orders 12 vacuum cleaners, and wants them shipped to Pakistan, and the billing address is Jane Smith from Arkansas, the order stinks of fraud. This scenario has happens more than you would think. The merchant is so thrilled to have the big sale, they don’t even consider that it could be fraud. In the end, the merchant pays for the product, pays for the shipping, pays Jane Smith’s credit card back, and even gets to pay a charge back fee from the bank. Ouch! The merchant is left feeling like it was someone else’s fault. Shouldn’t the bank or payment gateway prevent that? The merchant is the last line of defense and needs to use common sense and scrutinize their transactions. If it looks fraudulent, make a customer service call to the cardholder and ask some simple questions. This will quickly confirm whether or not the transaction is fraudulent.

Set Your Minimum and Maximum Transaction Amounts
Most payment gateways will let you set a minimum and maximum transaction amount for all of your orders. Using these features can greatly reduce a merchant’s exposure to fraud. If you don’t sell anything for under $9.99 then set the amount to $9.98. Also set the ceiling just above your realistic highest order amount.

This simple adjustment will help avoid a common hacker technique known as “Phishing”. Fishing is when a thief uses your Website or payment gateway to test a database full of stolen credit card numbers. They will run a high volume of small transactions
( $0.25) to see if the credit cards are good, and if so, they can exploit them elsewhere. When a merchant sees they have 2,000 transactions for 25 cents each, they are victims of a phishing attack. The bank will often hold the merchant responsible for paying the per transaction fees on all of the transaction. This hassle and frustration can be avoided by setting the minimum transaction amount to something greater than zero, and preferably over $1.00. Having your transactions set to AuthOnly will prevent all of these little phishing transaction from settling. Waking up Monday morning to find that you have settle 3,000 fraudulent transactions over the weekend is not the way you want to start your week.

Merchants can greatly reduce their exposure to fraud by running AuthOnly transactions, setting minimum and maximum transaction amounts, and scrutinizing their transactions before capturing the funds. Most decent online payment solutions will have these basic fraud prevention features available.

As with when you are looking for a card payment system and fraud detection system, for those looking to get a new credit card, it’s important to compare cards to get the best rate possible.

About the Author: James Curley is the founder and CEO of Mountain Media, an eCommerce and online payment solutions provider.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Nov 24th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 2 Comments

This is a touch different from my normals posts which cover Shopping Carts. I talk to a lot of people who want to set up online shops, or are in the process of doing so. There’s a mix of people. Some want to get a specific product out there and are fixed on selling online, while some just want to make some money on the side. I’m speaking to that second group here, and looking beyond the typical shopping cart approach.

CouponPress is a Coupon Script for WordPress. Basically, it has everything you need to setup up a coupon site. For those not familiar with coupon sites, the idea is you collect a bunch of coupons, either specific to an industry or generic, try and get some traffic, and when people who are about to buy are looking for a coupon, they (hopefully) come to your site. They click through, you include your URL along with the coupon code, they get their discount and you get your affiliate payment. Everyone is happy.

So what did I think of CouponPress? CouponPress (which is as easy to install as any WordPress theme)

My first attempt was on a shared WordPress installation. As a result, I didn’t do the recommended “reset all” option. Bad move. I struggled with it, till I did a fresh separated review, did the reset all and everything was super easy from there. So, DO pay attention to the advice to reset. I wasted an hour or two trying to beat it into shape without that!

Now that it’s working, after reset it’s a piece of cake to use. CouponPress is a nice piece of software. The basics will be up and running in 10 minutes, although to add your coupons, design your categories, upload your logo, add some articles, etc, all ads up to more than a few hours work. That’s not CouponPress’s fault – Mark Fail, the author of this theme, has gone above and beyond to make sure pretty much everything you could want to do is easy to do. It’s just how long some things take. Even basics such as setting up Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, etc, can be done in a minute or two thanks to some thoughtful add ons to ease these common and essential steps.

Recommended for those wanting to experiment with couponing.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 10th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 4 Comments

WordPress has long been the blogging software of choice by most bloggers (this is a WordPress blog!). As it’s evolved through versions it’s become increasingly more sophisticated and is now popular as a Content Management System (CMS).

There’s a growing number of WordPress Themes which add shopping cart functionality. While WordPress is unlikely (in the near term anyway) to be a serious contender for a large shop with tens of thousands of products, it’s finding a niche for smaller shops.

Below is 10 WordPress shopping cart themes and why these are good choices to consider for you to get started with your ecommerce experience.

iThemes is a clean looking theme that allows you to use the WP Ecommerce plug-in. While you may be able to use a standard theme from WordPress when installing a shopping cart plugin, using a theme such as this that is designed for you to get the most of all of the plugin’s features and create a crisp organized looking site is well worth the $79.95 payment price.

Crafty Cart is a free option for those who are tight on money when first starting out. It has an attractive design although, unless you are a little techie, you may have a difficult time making it look organized and clean when dealing with multiple categories. Depending on the products you are selling, you may or may not think this is the right design for you. Designed for the wp-ecommerce plugin.

Market Theme. The bonus with this type of theme is that not only is it a theme, it is also a shopping cart. You don’t need to activate one of the other WordPress ecommerce plugins once you have purchased a $55 license for this theme. It may be a little more technical to install and set up, but offers a professional looking theme with the ability to change and modify features to make it all your own.

ShopperPress. This is another “out of the box” shopping cart and theme all in one to use on your WordPress platform. While the cost is $79, it includes more than twenty themes you can choose from. There are also a number of widgets and plugins you can use.

PHPPurchase. This is another great theme that works with the WP Ecommerce plugin. This theme is perfect for those sellers who want to provide digital downloads easily. It’s also great for creating membership sites, subscription payments and more. It has a reputation for being high customizable. Cost for this theme is $50.

WordPress e store plugin theme. This is a great deal at $39.95 considering all of the features included. You can even setup your auto-responder to work with this theme and the e-shop plugin. Autoresponders are a great way to keep in touch with your customers when you have sales, specials, and new products.

Themes2wp.com. There are four themes offered on this site. They include a World Shipping theme, an Online Shopping Accessories theme, a Christmas theme, and a Shopping Spree theme. These are free and can be used with the WP-eccomerce plugin. If you are just selling a few items you can use a paypal button instead.

Simple Cart. Another popular free option. While it’s simple to configure in the admin panel once you have installed it, it does have 2 components for install. You need to install the wp-ecommerce plugin as well as another called Thematic. This is a nice crisp colorful theme that has a grid layout and is easy to swap out images and completely customize as to your own preference.

Color Cart Green. This free theme offers a 3 column layout like most of the previous entries listed above. It has 2 sidebars that are fully widgetized. This is also used with the wp-ecommerce plugin.

WP-Store. This was designed for the wp-eccomerce plugin version 3.7. The admin section has be modified from the original version so that you can set up and control the “latest product” section, home page products, and customize a top products widget. This has a grey background and black header area. This type of theme isn’t suitable for all storefronts as it isn’t as colorful and shiny as many others are.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 4th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

One of the challenges that some ecommerce merchants have, particular those who sell digital goods, is recurring subscriptions. If you have a very simple $X/month model with a small number of people then the PayPal recurring subscriptions is probably good enough.

Early Impact, makers of ProductCart, just release SubscriptionBridge, a service designed to provide a more enterprise friendly subscription service. The differences between this and PayPal are numerous. One key one is the ability to not use PayPal! It supports Authorize.net as the payment gateway. It has hooks into Magento and of course ProductCart with more to come. Worth checking out if you need to handl recurring payments in a scaleable way.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 13th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

I got an email from Craig at Pinnacle Cart about their new “Drift Marketing” feature in Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5. While I’m familiar with the concept, I have to admit the term drift marketing is a new one to me.

The concept is that if a customer gets part way through the checkout purchase and abandons, drift marketing allows you to target them in various ways to encourage them to complete the purchase. In the words of Pinnacle:

(Drift Marketing) Provides incentives to customers who abandon their checkout process at selected time intervals. This system is designed to remarket to customers who become distracted or leave your store with items in their cart. Set up as many campaigns as you want and get your customers to return to the store and complete their order.

This feature, if setup well, will almost certainly increase your conversion rate, putting money straight to your bottom line. There’s a few other nice features in the latest version as well, but this was the standout for me. Check out the newest version of Pinnacle Cart.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 8th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

Come on. We’ve all been tempted to review our own products – very positively of course! Surely everyone does it? Rememer a few years ago when Amazon had a glitch on their site revealing reviewers real names and there were numerous glowing reviews written by the authors? Hardly surprising.

However, the FTC seems to be cracking down on this.

This article on the risks of user generated reviews talks about such problems:

Between November 2008 and May 2009, Reverb staff posted reviews about clients’ games in a manner that, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), gave the impression the comments “were written by disinterested customers.”  Reverb failed to disclose that it was hired to promote the games and often received a percentage of sales.

So be careful about reviewing your own products!

FYI, I screen all the reviews on this site for reviews written by someone at the company. I won’t disclose the methods I use as that would help the culprits circumvent them, but let’s just say I have blocked more than one review left by the company which makes the software. Maybe I should just report them to the FTC instead….

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Aug 30th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

I get asked a lot about shopping carts – no surprise there. One thing I get asked time to time, which I’ve never had a great answer for, is what happens if you have a shop selling just a few items. A normal shopping cart is no good for someone with 5 items, it’s over kill. Lots of people are in that position – wanting to sell a few books, a few CDs, a few home made crafts, whatever.

I did see an interesting solution today. I don’t know if it’s perfect, but it’s a good start. It’s a WordPress template that has a built in shopping cart – look for the “eStore” template on that site. So no promises but if you need a solution like that, worth considering, especially for $39.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Aug 9th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

The ever insightful Dominique found an interesting experience that Google is testing with their shopping results. This is pretty powerful stuff, and seems to eliminate much of the value we all try to add to our sites, and get it all down to model and price. I wonder if this is a good thing, or if Google are actually doing users a disservice?

Screenshots of the experience below (I recommend you use the “View Fullscreen” in the menu button).

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Aug 7th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

As you probably know, WordPress is almost certainly the world’s most popular blogging platform. This blog is WordPress. It’s also a pretty good CMS. There’s lots of time when people have a blog and want to sell perhaps just a few items. WordPress can help!

I came across this site with a great collection of WordPress ecommerce resources. Some of the better ones include:

• The Shopp ecommerce plugin
• The functional Shopperpress theme
• And a nice ecommerce theme

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• 8 Online Shopping WordPress Themes for Niche Stores (wpjedi.com)

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Aug 6th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments